Magwhees/Stone Glass Steel - Pane
I say that music is all about texture, and one-man creative forces who compose infinitely layered albums are equivalent to pop superstars in my kingdom. David Sullivan, who performs as Magwheels, builds musique concrête pieces from guitar, pulling fragile melodies and abrasive washes of feedback drenched noise from the strings of the instrument. Stone Glass Steel is Phil Easter whose credo is simply: "Take it apart -- put it together again -- mold it like putty." Pane is ostensibly a split release between the two but the trick is that the two part 40 minute suite attributed to Stone Glass Steel is composed entirely of samples from the back catalogue of Magwheels.
"The trick." As if the Stone Glass Steel deconstruction/reconstruction were a gimmick meant to entice you into buying the record. Easter's entire purpose for SGS is the art of recontextualization, putting what you "know" in jeopardy by recrafting the familiar into the eerily surreal. Think of it as Picasso going Cubist with scissors and glue on your album of family snapshots: you recognize the individual pieces of the people in the new pictures -- an eye here, an ear there, the curl of someone's hair -- you just don't know the new faces.
Now the Möbius strip of this release is that Sullivan's work is already composed of sampled and reconstructed material -- albeit original compositions. Sullivan uses a Macintosh to heavily process and tweak field recordings and his own guitar work into sonic structures that seek to capture the elusive quality of early morning light. "Sundeenovember" is populated by the fine, fragile light which breaks over the horizon first, the thin threads of yellow and gold which streak across the landscape. Two of the tracks, "Cloakpocket" and "Lastboring," are less than a minute in length each and both are snapshots which capture the gradations of dawn -- blink and you'll miss them moments where the light is changing quickly. "Monolithic Songbird" is not the fragile ephemera of early light, but rather the intense blaze of an unobscured sun. For two minutes it is like being on the surface of Mercury as the sun rolls across the horizon and boils the ground, the rocks popping and crackling as they vaporize.
The centerpiece of the record is "The Only Window Is So High Up," an eight minute piece which blurs all of the elements of the remaining six tracks into one evolving soundtrack where light moves with liquid intelligence. Filled with the ebb and flow of Sullivan's guitar, "The Only Window Is So High Up" is replete with the fragility of a single note stretched to its elastic limit as well as the full-throated howl of a stringed instrument being tortured by an electric prod. Magwheels is the point of impact between noise and drones.
The Stone Glass Steel suite, titled The Last Rays of Sunlight Paint Fire on the Window, is filled with the same fragile sense of liminal birth which streaks through Sullivan's work. The first part of the suite, "The Last Rays of Sunlight," is an evocation of sunset on the beach at Cardiff. There is that moment at nightfall when the sun hangs on the edge of the horizon and there is still light in the sky. Trails of orange and red, washes of yellow and gold, streaks of pink and lavendar: these hues spread across the sky in patterns and shapes in an endless variety. While Magwheels may concentrate on that single beam of light which first breaks the horizon, Stone Glass Steel sets the sky on fire with light.
The second part of the suite, "Paint Fire on the Window," begins the instant the sun vanishes behind the horizon and all the color is sucked into its wake, striping the sky of the luminous trails. The dome of the horizon becomes blue and then black, and all that is left are the tiny pinpricks of light which mankind kindle in devoted memory to the passage of the sun. "Paint Fire on the Window" is the guttering, chattering sound of our collective apprehension at the coming of night. It ends with a lonely phone ringing as a tiny variation of the first theme of sunset sputters out. The ringing phone reminds me of the phone in Pink Floyd's The Wall which, when unanswered, spins Pink into his labyrinth of despair.
With Pane, Magwheels and Stone Glass Steel create pellucid and beautiful tone poems to the evanescent nature of first and last light, but also show us the frailty of our relationship. We live because of light, it allows us to see, and, without it, we are lost. There is nothing to sing along to on Pane, nothing you can hum in the shower, but every sound collage evokes what we love and fear about light. Pane is a window, the only window on the blank walls on our prison. We watch with wonderment as the light changes.
Magwheels
Stone Glass Steel
Ad Noiseam [2003]
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